Originally posted by Billikins the Bold:Bin Laden is *not* the leader of the Taliban. He *is* the leader of an extremely anit-American terror group and has (and may still) reside in Afghanistan but he is *not* the leader of the Taliban.

Originally posted by skywalker:Hate to say it, but many people will do horrible things to the people of their own country for lots of money.

Look what happened in Oklahoma and he didn't do it for money.

Mark

The American govermant has no reason AT ALL to attack themselfs
What use would it be to attack a building that costs millions of dollars ???
than and the cost of lives is something that the US would never do to itselfs

Rikard, I don´t think you can get that many Israelic suicide bombers actually..

Bin-Laden is not the leader of the Talibans, but close to them and has a training camp in Afghanistan and works together with a Taliban terrorist.

What talks for Bin-Laden is that he is a strong leader that could persuade so many to go on a collective suiced mission at once. That has never happened before.

BUt well.. speculations...
In times like these, we try do understand, no matter how close to the truth we will come. An important thing now is that all democratic countries start to work together more actively to work against terrorism, to try and prevent anything like this to happen again..

Originally posted by Billikins the Bold:Firstly my condolences to all affected by this.

Whoever did this presumably had their own pilots along: I really can't see how you would get a pilot to crash into the world trade centre under duress: if he knew he was going to die, surely he'd ditch the plane in the river.

To me this highlights the possibility of state backing: finding four airline pilots would be difficult for a terrorist group. Could be wrong though: could be that four "pilots" were traind up to a minimal level. I just don't know.

As to Bush? Nah! Having said that (and I honestly don't believe, in a million years that he would even consider it) the finger of suspicion has long pointed at the Russian intelligence services in connection with the mysterious "Chechen" explosions that killed 100's of people in Russian tower blocks shortly before the second Chechen war that co-incidently saw Putin elected.

Pilot training is no great issue here, essentially the bombers only had to take control of the plane at the last minute, the pilots could be forced to fly to a location under the impression they would not be killed if they complied, and then the terrorist could fly the plane into the building. Essentially piltoing is only difficult on take off / landing and in adverse conditions, flying in good weather into a building is a low order skill. Navigating however is trickier

------------------ Holy Avenger of the OHF and part time Pinguindiebjäger

Obviously none of us know at this point who is responsible. However, the selection of targets was quite interesting.

On the world stage, the US is most dominant in two spheres -- economic and military. The two targets, the world trade center and the pentagon, were the two most central symbols of US might in those areas.